skepticism will rarely steer you wrong. In fact, it's one of the key elements of rational thinking.

We have found out that respected men discussed the manipulation of science, the blocking of freedom of information requests, the exclusion of dissenting scientists from debate, the removal of dissent from the peer-reviewed publications, and the discarding of historical temperature data and e-mail evidence.

Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

There is a film about AIDS "The Band Plays On" and it remains a quietly powerful work. We too soon forget the politics and egos that needlessly allowed that disease to spread. An example of another scandal in a previous decade with consequences that we cannot afford in a different scientific discipline.

Tthe keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.